Childhood Guilt Trip

I've been utterly mesmerized by Ken Burns' new documentary on World War II which debuted last night on PBS. It's showing every night this week and the last two episodes have been predictably powerful, intimate and shattering. I suppose the fact that we are watching the HDTV version channel only enhances the poignancy of some of the photographic detail. I simply can't tear myself away.

Watching something as pivotal in our national history would hardly cause one to think of their own small world, but in fact, it did. My mother was British and a child in London during The Blitz. My grandmother was a young divorcee raising two daughters singlehandedly. She ran a small cafe in the south end of London to make a living to support her small family. This was during the early 1940s. My mother and my aunt played amongst the rubble in the streets and scavenged bombed out homes. They rationed food and savored treats like jam and chocolate (a treat my mother was always particularly covetous of her entire life). When there were attacks, they slept in the Tube station. My grandmother could never bear to send them into the country for safety so they experienced more than a few episodes of air sirens and bomb shelters and seeing childhood friends' homes flattened by bombs. They remember asking American soldiers for chewing gum and girls drawing faux stocking lines up the back of their legs with eyebrow pencil. The memories were always exquisitely detailed.

The British who survived this period (and indeed anyone who lived through this period as a soldier or a civilian) carried the history like a badge of honor. I reckon that was due given the sacrifices they certainly made. Little did I know that the bank my mother earned as a child during those war years would hang over my entire childhood.

Indeed, when I displayed dissatisfaction at some childish trifle, Mom would trot out her stock line, "When I was a child during the war...." This was usually followed by "...I would be grateful to have an orange for Christmas in my stocking" or "...I was lucky to even have a road to walk to school on" or my favorite "I would have given my life to have a bed like this." And so on. Of course it made me feel guilty.

What was worse was Grandma, who lived with us as I grew up. Grandma was Mom's wingman who perpetuated the memory of this dreadful period of time. She would emphasize the horror of the war by telling us stories of the bombings; tales of finding her neighbors dead in their beds after an air raid; the cold fear of hiding in small alleyways to avoid the showering of hot pellets of shrapnel. OK, so I feel shitty asking if we can have some ice cream when all Grandma got in her stocking for Christmas was a hunk of coal for their modest fire chute to warm a family of eight.

While I was sympathetic to this plight, times had changed. The usual preface "When I was a child during the War" started to become a family joke as I got older. We'd all ape it in unison and Mom would laugh knowing the expression had worn out its welcome.

A few years back, a small independent film was released called "Hope & Glory." It highlighted the experiences of a young boy who lived through The Blitz. I took Mom to this movie. At one point during the film I glanced over to my mother and she sat mesmerized with tears running silently down her cheeks. It was as if she too were back on the old New Cross Road high street clamoring over the ruin piles and waving a stick over her head, the newly declared King of the Hill. I clearly saw how pivotal that time really was to her and I was moved.

It reminds me that really the previous generation, those who weathered World War II, really did earn a kind of special bank. For the sacrifices in all respects perhaps Tom Brokaw was right when he referred to them as the "greatest generation." I wonder how well current generations would hold up in the face of such adversity.

Alas, I never told my mother that.